Boost your business with “Video PR”
With the New Year just around the corner, businesses need to be looking at their strategies and trends for the forthcoming year. Specifically, which channels to allocate their marketing budgets. 
One of the most exciting marketing channels to watch next year (quite literally and pardoning any puns) is video PR. All our sources tell us that this is the fastest growing area, with the UK being the third on the list for the highest number of videos watched in 2011, so far. This equates to a staggering 166 billion videos viewed in the past 12 months with only America and Canada ahead of us in the viewing statistics.
From a consumer’s perspective, video is a much more accessible format in such a congested media. It gives the story far more impact through both sound and pictures, and has the potential to go viral if the subject matter is entertaining enough or it catches an emerging trend. When you think about it, are you more likely to switch on your mobile device/TV or travel to the shop to buy a newspaper? Technological advances are the biggest influence on the way society operates. Marketing departments therefore need to stay ahead of the game.
Brands using video as a promotional or point of purchase tool are enjoying significantly higher conversion rates than those using static content, therefore if your business does not currently include video in its strategy this is a strong indication it should be included for 2012.
Video also massively helps your SEO opportunities attracting the attention of search engines, especially when supported by a keyword-rich title and a paragraph about its content. This needs to be taken very seriously when you consider that Google now owns YouTube,
If you need any further convincing that video PR needs to be part of your business marketing mix for 2012, then here are some of the facts and figures:
- A total of 1.2 billion people watched 201.4 billion online videos in October 2011 alone.
- 85% of marketing brand managers currently use online video on websites for promoting products and services.
- Videos are 53 times more likely to generate a first page ranking than traditional SEO techniques.
- If a small business adds a video to their website’s business profile:
- Profile views are increased by 100%
- Profile clicks are increased by 30%
- Generated calls are increased by 18%
- The ecommerce site receives an increase of 55% in its flow of traffic, increase of 30% in the physical site, and incidence of purchases gets an increase of 24%.
What can video PR be used for?
Video can achieve all the usual PR angles and more. Here are a few examples of videos your company may use:
- VNR (Video News Release) – must be newsworthy and strong to send around television stations
- Product Launches
- Video of conferences and events
- Video for conferences and events
- Vox pops
- Client testimonial videos
- Video tour of your company office
- Short interviews to introduce personnel
- “How to” videos to demonstrate your expertise
Where can these videos be seen?
The internet offers many destinations for video to be posted including magazine/news websites, blogs, company websites, micro-blogs, forums and direct emailing. In fact if you have produced a video for your latest release you are more likely to get covered by local and national press due to their current demand of video content. The traffic to newspaper websites is continuing to surge despite a decline in print circulation and editors are embracing video for higher SEO in a media where convergence journalism is an absolute must.
At Bridge we already have magazine and news editors crying out for video content, and we predict this will be a growing trend in 2012.
How can you market your business with video?
Bridge has a range of video packages to suit every budget and every need, from a straightforward short, sharp video news release to a bigger budget corporate video.
To find out more, just get in touch.
Myth-busting social media
We can all be sceptical about change and I’m increasingly seeing resistance to when it comes to businesses using social media.
In my experience, lack of time and knowledge crop up as the most popular reasons given for companies not making the most of social media.
But there are a number of other common social media myths that put people off engaging with it. So, let’s shine the spotlight on some of these myths to dispel them.
1. Social media is too time consuming, and I don’t have the resources.
Yes, social media takes time like any other marketing tool, but if done well it’s a good investment of your time. And it really doesn’t have to be as time consuming as you might think. Online tools that help to simplify social media activity include aggregator sites such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. But more importantly, saving time comes down to effective planning and project management. By planning social media into your marketing strategy from the outset, you will soon reap the benefits.
2. Social media is too complicated.
Anyone new to social media can find it confusing and quite daunting with the rapid launch of new social media sites, tools and apps. However, once you have immersed yourself in social media communities, you will wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s as tackling an ocean. The first step is to dip your toe in the water. The most sensible approach is to simply “listen” to what is going on before you actually join the conversation on a social media platform. A great place to start getting a feel for what is happening on the major social media platforms is Mashable (www.mashable.com).
3. Social media is dangerous.
Fear of saying the wrong thing online is something we hear all too often. After all once your content is out there, it’s out there to stay. There are many examples of corporations severely damaging their reputations online as a result of their employees and executives saying and doing the wrong thing. So, what can you do to make sure your messages are positive and well received? The key to this is to have a robust social media strategy and policy in place that is understood by everyone involved in your business.
4. Social media is not effective.
Not so. Social media marketing is being used to great effect by large corporates, providing access to target audiences as well as giving you access to a wealth of market intelligence about your industry sector – the added bonus being that most of it is free! The beauty of the digital age is that it allows data capture on a phenomenal scale. This means that demographic data can be used to really pinpoint the customers you want to engage with. The trick is to do your customer profiling well, and then look at which social media channels will work best for reaching them.
5. Social media is too trivial.
“I don’t have time to read about what people had for breakfast.” Despite Twitter being used by high profile celebrities and executives from well-known large corporates, the myth that all the chatter is about the trivial things in life still prevails. Some people do, of course, post regular updates on every aspect of their lives, but generally anyone using social media for business will connect with like-minded people in online business communities.
All of these myths are simply barriers that can be easily knocked down by having a good strategy and policy in place, good content, and an understanding of how social media works. If you have a business, then you should at least explore the opportunities that social media offers. It is, after all, a marketing tool, and one that is steadily gaining in popularity.
What you can do to join the social media revolution
Bridge offers a range of low cost solutions to help get you started and on the right track for your social media marketing:
Social Media Starter Package
Our starter package is ideal if you don’t have the time or resources to do your own social media. For as little as £35 per hour plus VAT for a minimum of three hours per week, we can get you up and running with social media accounts with your company logos and branding, manage all your content curation and postings, and measure your Return on Online Investment. For more information: www.bridgepr.co.uk/our-services/social-media-marketing.html
Social Media Workshops
Our half day workshops equip you with the basic tools and knowledge to get you started in managing your own social media marketing. You will learn about social media strategy and policy, how to set up accounts, how to generate content, and how to manage your time and resources.
For further information: http://www.bridgepr.co.uk/training-courses
Will Google ‘Instant’ kill the SEO star?
Two weeks after the introduction of Google Instant, the new tool from the Google giant is a hot topic on the blogosphere. Google Instant is a new search enhancement that, unlike the previous search engine, enables results to change as you type. Will it or will it not affect the SEOs, this is the question at the moment, and PR is directly involved, since SEO copywriting is practically the basis for digital PR.
Search Engine Optimisation means getting search engines to really like your copy and become involved in a solid relationship with your site. If this happens, search engines will prove their commitment to this relationship by placing your site high up in the rankings on the result page. On the IT part, this is done through some spider like tools that extract keywords and create links and connections to search engines (short version for dummies). But as far as PR is concerned, this relationship is created through keywords, by doing keyword research and finding accurately targeted, appropriate keywords. There is a choice of inserting long or short tail keywords, depending on what better suits your content and audience.
For this reason, SEO copywriting is a highly valued asset for PR and of course, for companies in need of good copy. And as copywriters were starting to master this practice, Google released Instant to challenge their skills. TechCrunch, (btw a very visible site due to SEOs) was quick to take up the topic and has already carried a small study on the consequences of this new tool. It might be overdramatic to say that SEOs are dying but there are definitely consequences for both organic and paid search results.
Basically, since the search result page changes a few times before completing your search, more results than before are pushed after the fold. The ones at the top are favoured and show increases in driving traffic to sites, the ones in the middle are insignificantly pushed down but it’s bad news for the ones at the end as they are mostly sent on the second page. So, getting a top position on the search engine result page is now, more important than ever. For pay per click and adwords, this also means more competition for keywords.
Since suggestions constantly change while you’re typing, the most popular keywords will appear while the less popular combinations and long tail keywords to be less visible and drive less traffic. So less variety and more short tail keywords. There are benefits for local pay per click results as these are enhanced, in the lack of a specified location.
These are the changes noticed so far by the tech community, but we’ll be able to make more sense of it after a longer period of use, so there may be more or contrasting changes.
So what can we do about it? With the information available so far, it seems that there is nothing radically changing but it’s more a case of ‘if you haven’t done it so far, now it’s the time’. Keyword research to discover the popular varieties and using analytics to check which keywords drive more traffic and which not and compress or replace the long-tail ones are important.
The creative part of SEO copywriting is very much valid. Besides digital optimisations, content is still king. Factual information and a strong content strategy are essential for linking the digital to human commitment. The spider like tool might be easily tricked by dense keywords but customers usually aren’t.
Overall, the appearance of Google Instant is a good wake up call for all and it goes to prove, if proof were necessary, that new media is no steady business. Since social media is the new prodigy, new media are not that new and shiny anymore. A lot of knowledge and experience already exists in this field, so it’s rather easy to fall in the trap of seeing new media as a controlled phenomenon, with set practices. But every now and then something even newer comes up, proving that, at the fast pace we’re going, there is little time for expertise and much more for learning, improving and constantly updating. I wonder if someone there at Google is having a good laugh about all this…
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/guest-post-how-google-instant-can-help-and-hurt-seo/ (link for techcrunch)







